'If we take the proper steps, we can save lives, but we have to act fast," President Obama said on Tuesday. "We can't dawdle on this one. We have to move with force and make sure that we are catching this as best we can given that this has broken out in ways we have not seen before."

'I'm just saying, you know, if I were Osama Bin Laden — he's a very smart guy, I've spent a lot of time thinking about him — and I nearly got him once. I nearly got him. And I could have killed him, but I would have to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him."

The news that Google executive Forrest Hayes died on a yacht after being injected with heroin by a "date" he met on a website that connects "sugar daddies" with "sugar babies" has prompted not only charges against the woman, 26-year-old Alix Tichelman, and an investigation of a similar death (ruled accidental) involving Tichelman in 2013, but also questions about the website that brought the husband and father into contact with the woman who literally killed him.

Jerusalem used to be safe. It is nearly 40 miles from Gaza and 3,000 feet above sea level. In the last go-round, the Hamas rockets couldn't reach that far. Now they can. Rockets were fired aimed at both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv last week, as Israel launched its own offensive in Gaza. "Every Israeli is a target," a Hamas spokesman was quoted in the press.

Every four years, at some point in the presidential campaign, one candidate says something that leads the other to accuse him (or her) of challenging his (or her) patriotism, and then we have a 48-hour spat over who called who unpatriotic, and then we go back to the usual political game in which talking heads viciously attack each other 24/7.

My friends from outside of Los Angeles are horrified. "Donald Sterling is a pig?" they say with surprise. "A racist, ignorant, loud-mouthed fool?" And Jewish, to boot. This is not, my mother would have said, good for the Jews.

For years, when I was on the speech circuit at colleges and universities, I would always inquire about how many instances of sexual assault had occurred on campus that year — not how many convictions, but how many instances. The answers I got were, quite literally, unbelievable. None, I would be told, which was almost as ridiculous of reports of one or two such instances. At no campus I visited were there ever more than four or five.

In the mid-90s, when affirmative action was a hot topic in California, I got a call from a television network asking whether I would be available to do a segment on affirmative action. As is always true on television, the first and critical question was: "Are you free at 3?" I was. Great, the young woman said.